Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp
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Under these circumstances, one might indeed wonder whether we are speaking of “animals” at all. Within lab parlance certain creatures are regularly described in non-animal terms (as numbered occupants of a cage, data points, or lab subjects). Such practices are an important focus of analysis throughout this book; as we shall see, however, this does not necessarily demonstrate their blanket objectification.
It is here that Donna Haraway’s interventions are crucial. Although Haraway has long concerned herself with themes associated with biocapital, she has always simultaneously foregrounded intimacy as an inevitable, inescapable, and equally important consequence of human-animal encounters in science (2003, 2008, 2012, 1989, 1997). Haraway is known for her playful analyses of interspeciality, an approach that, as noted above, has inspired a plethora of projects that challenge the presumed impermeability of species boundaries and human preeminence. Yet such studies sadly overlook Haraway’s assertion that interspecies encounters are all too often life-and-death matters that may well entail the suffering of both the animal and the human caretaker (2008). STS scholarship has similarly breathed life, so to speak, into laboratory domains, where sustained ethnographic engagement in the quotidian corners of science demonstrates how the lab itself is a richly complex world where a range of life forms toil together in the name of furthering scientific knowledge. And like Haraway, the authors of these works are well aware that scientific engagement frequently involves the “sacrificing” of animals for science (see, for instance, Arluke 1991; Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Friese and Clarke 2012; Lynch 1988). Given this often inescapable premise, I admit that after focusing on animal lab research for the last decade or so, I bristle at playful celebrations of “multispecies” encounters (see Kirksy 2014). My concern is that their ludic tenor habitually obscures the deeper (or darker) dimensions of human-animal relations. Research laboratories are high-stakes domains because of the often precarious nature of experimental involvement for non-human creatures.
I am, nevertheless, intrigued by the possibilities engendered by interspecies intimacy (Sharp 2006a, 2011a, 2011c), a concern of long-standing interest in anthropology, as exhibited by now-classic texts (Douglas 1966, 1970; Evans-Prichard 1940; Leach 1964) and subsequently revived in studies of science (Franklin 2003, 2007; Haraway 2003, 1989; Helmreich 2009; Pálsson 2014; Papagaroufali 1996; Strathern 1985; Taussig 2004). Interests I share with these authors include how attention to animals can manifest moral insights and how such insights may well lie beyond an established anthropological fascination with kindredness. Whereas my previous research with bioengineers revealed a propensity to entangle human and calf genealogies in accounts of the discipline’s history (Sharp 2013), such sensibilities did not emerge as a dominant framework for relating to other experimental creatures in other kinds of laboratories. Animals of all sorts nevertheless elicit affective responses among the humans who employ them in experiments. As much of this book demonstrates, the toll that animal suffering takes on both lab animals and human personnel figures prominently in shaping moral thought and action. Efforts to locate sentiment, however, define a significant challenge because suffering and death are widely understood as taboo subjects of discourse.
These sorts of interventions are crucial to Animal Ethos. Unlike Noske, my goal is not to expose or document how science denigrates nature. Instead, I am most interested in how humans who work in labs question, wrestle with, and challenge a range of scientific assumptions and practices in ways that reshape established rubrics of welfare and care. As noted above, an especially troublesome reality concerns animal death as part-and-parcel of research protocols, a tenet of animal welfare, and a key concern in efforts to provide quality care. As I frame this analytically, I draw on the sociology and history of science (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Lederer 1992; Lynch 1988; Ritvo 1987), lab-based ethnographies (Friese and Clarke 2012; Svendsen 2015; Svendsen and Koch 2014), and the works of moral philosophers and bioethicists concerned with lab animal well-being (Donnelley 1989, 1992; Gruen 2013, 2015; Regan 1986). Together, these authors assist in deciphering experimental laboratories as moral domains.
Welfare, Suffering, and Care
As should be clear by now, my purpose is neither to demean nor judge the experimental use of animals. Instead, associated moral claims help answer the question inspired by Ingold, namely, What is a laboratory animal? My research has taught me that lab animals are never solely reified creatures. Instead, they are many things at once: precious commodities; specialized research subjects; skilled working animals; sources of valuable data; and favorite, individual, and named beings. In Mol’s sense, a lab creature is an animal “multiple” (2002). This sensibility emerges as one moves within and across lab labor hierarchies, which include senior research scientists, an array of students and trainees, lab-based veterinarians, and animal technicians or caretakers, each of whom morally (re)configure animals in distinctive ways.
In his essay “The Utility of Basic Animal Research,” former zoo and current lab veterinarian Larry Carbone offers us a quasi-regulatory approach to this conundrum by asking what moral standards must exist to justify “the infliction of animal suffering” in experimental contexts. Carbone—known for his work on the entwined moral and regulatory dimensions of pain in animal science (2004, 2011)—explains that the paired principles of “speciesism” and “utility” must be demonstrated if animal research is to be “morally justified.” As he explains, “(some) animals must be sufficiently different from humans in morally relevant ways to allow the morality of speciesism, and (some) animals must be sufficiently similar to humans biologically for cross-species extrapolation to have utility. Both conditions are necessary, and neither by itself is sufficient to justify animal experimentation” (2012, S12, italics in original). These principles are key to ethical animal experimentation in the United States, where animals stand in as models or proxies for humans, and where an evolutionary hierarchy justifies substituting animals for humans to protect the latter from harm. In turn, mammalian species—be they monkeys, dogs, or rats—approximate humans in a plethora of ways (in terms of, for example, physiology, metabolism, cognition, behavior, and emotion). What makes Carbone’s assertions unusual is his unapologetic use of “suffering.”
Joel Robbins has argued recently that suffering is an overworked and tired category of analysis within anthropology, a field dominated by the study of “the [human] subject living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression.” This preoccupation informs a paucity of attention “on such topics as value, morality, well-being, imagination, empathy, care,” and others. Robbins argues for a shift “toward an anthropology of the good” and, more specifically, a focus on how “people organize their personal and collective lives in order to foster what they think of as good … and what it is like to live at least some of the time in light of such a project” (2013, 448, 457). My personal quibbles aside (as a medical anthropologist who has written on human suffering and taught courses on affliction for several decades), Robbins’s essay prompts several questions. To start, if we return to Carbone’s assertions, how should we approach contexts where causing pain and suffering is intentional? Or where the object of such action is not human but animal? What are we to make of high-stakes contexts where death is part of everyday life and work? If we embrace Robbins’s assertions and search for the “good,” what would define moral action? What might such an approach entail? What might it erase?
In response, I propose a compromise. Again, as Carbone explains, suffering is an inescapable aspect of laboratory experimentation; and although suffering and death do not figure in the official lexicon of laboratory research, they nevertheless assert a ghostly presence (Gordon 1997). Importantly, lab personnel remain simultaneously cognizant of animal “suffering” while striving for “the good” through quality, daily attention to animal well-being. This tension originates in the history of animal “welfare” and, in quotidian contexts, is evidenced in the “logic” of laboratory “care in practice” (Mol 2008).
Animals as Human Proxies: Origin Stories
In their study of industrialized clinical labor, sociologists Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby underscore the importance of recognizing historical conditions or “lineages” that facilitate what they reference as “the outsourcing of risk” (2014, 19). Although their target of analysis is the offshore movement of clinical trials and reproductive surrogacy, their words prove relevant to animal laboratory research. Whereas Cooper and Waldby address conditions